Leicestershire

Leicester is the County Town of the County of Leicestershire

The name of Leicester comes from Old English. It is first recorded in Latinised form in the early ninth century as Legorensis civitatis and in Old English itself in an Anglo-Saxon Chronicle entry for 924 as Ligera ceastre (and, in various spellings, frequently thereafter). In the Domesday Book of 1086, it is recorded as Ledecestre.

The first element of the name is the name of a people, the Ligore (whose name appears in Ligera ceastre in the genitive plural form); their name came in turn from the river Ligor (now the River Soar), the origin of whose name is uncertain but thought to be from Brittonic (possibly cognate with the name of the Loire).

The second element of the name is the Old English word ceaster ("(Roman) fort, fortification, town", itself borrowed from Latin castrum).

A list of British cities in the ninth-century History of the Britons includes one Cair Lerion; Leicester has been proposed as the place to which this refers (and the Welsh name for Leicester is Caerlŷr). But this identification is not certain.

Based on the Welsh name (given as Kaerleir), Geoffrey of Monmouth proposes a king Leir of Britain as an eponymous founder in his Historia Regum Britanniae (12th century).

Leicestershire

Leicester is the County Town of the County of Leicestershire

Leicestershire pages:

Ashby -De-La-Zouch

Ashby-de-la-Zouch Castle

Ashby-de-la-Zouch Hastings

Blaby

Bradgate

Coalville Belvoir

Hinckley

Hinckley Ambion

Kibworth & Fleckney

Leicester De Montfort

Leicester

Leicester Novus

Loughborough

Loughborough Beacon

Lutterworth

Lutterworth Wycliffe

Market Bosworth

Market Harborough

Melton Aurora

Melton Mowbray Belvoir

Melton Enterprise

Oadby

Shepshed

Shepshed Charnwood

South East Midlands Hub

Wreake Valley

Welland Valley

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E-Club 1070

Cambridgeshire

Lincolnshire

Northamptonshire

Rutland

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